Kerwyn C Huang (Associate Professor)

Personal bioKerwyn Casey ("KC") Huang received his B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from Caltech in 1998. He spent a year as a Churchill Scholar at Cambridge University, earning his M. Phil. in Physics in 1999 under Guna Rajagopal on Quantum Monte Carlo simulations of hydrogen bonding in water clusters. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from MIT in 2004, working with Prof. John Joannopoulos on electromagnetic flux localization in polaritonic photonic crystals and the control of melting at semiconductor surfaces using nanoscale coatings. During a short summer internship at NEC Research Labs, he acquired an interest in self-organization in biological systems, and moved on to become a Postdoctoral Fellow with Ned Wingreen in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton working on the relationships among cell shape detection, determination, and maintenance in bacteria. He began as an assistant professor of Bioengineering at Stanford in the fall of 2008. His research group utilizes a combination of analytical, computational, and experimental approaches to probe physical mechanisms of shape-related self-organization in the regulation and mechanics of cell division, cell growth and morphology determination, membrane organization, and ion channel cooperativity.